


a thousand shades more

by theexistentialteapot



Category: The Old Guard (Movie 2020)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Soulmates, Angst, F/F, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Reunions, Seeing Colour AU, Sniper Nicky, Temporary Character Death, also Andy and Quynh deserve their happy ending FIGHT ME, artist Joe - Freeform, colour soulmates, sad Booker
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-03
Updated: 2020-10-03
Packaged: 2021-03-07 19:14:00
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,764
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26802727
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/theexistentialteapot/pseuds/theexistentialteapot
Summary: Back when Joe had first leaned to draw, colour had meant nothing to him. He’d had pale chalks and dark charcoals as a child and had lost hours to sweeping strokes across paving stones.Then colour had come into his life with all the subtlety of the man at its source. The world had burst into bold tints and fierce hues; endless possibilities for him to explore and with eternity to experience it all.[colour soulmates au]
Relationships: Andy | Andromache of Scythia/Quynh | Noriko, Joe | Yusuf Al-Kaysani/Nicky | Nicolò di Genova
Comments: 27
Kudos: 276





	a thousand shades more

**Author's Note:**

> _you see the world in black and white until the day you touch your soulmate. when they die, you lose the colour they brought to your life._

“Oh, that’s beautiful.”

Nile comes up on Joe’s right shoulder, mug of tea cupped between her palms.

“Thank you.” He shuffles over so she can sit down on the bench, moving aside his paints. She’s studying his work intently.

“The shades here are perfect,” she tells him, eyes darting between the painting and the view before them, “it’s like the shadows are lifting off the canvas. What colours have you used?”

Joe’s smile is wide, and he flips his paintbrush to gesture with the end. “Here, whites and greys for the houses at the bottom of the hill. Here,” he points the handle higher, “yellows with pink, and then some red here, just as the sun rose.”

“So, that would be orange right here? Pale though?” she points at the right splash of colour and Joe turns, brow lifting in surprise. “Art History with a focus on colour differentials,” she says proudly. “My professor said I had the best monochromatic eye he’d ever seen.”

Joe promptly slides the paints across the bench and picks his spare canvas up off the grass. “Join me?”

“Really?” Nile grins wide and eager as he hands her a brush. She hovers over the paints for a moment, chewing her lip between her teeth. Her eyes rove determinedly over the unlabelled paints and the sky, before she plucks up a purple pot. Joe has to resist the urge to wrap his arm round her shoulders.

Back when Joe had first leaned to draw, colour had meant nothing to him. He’d had chalks and charcoals as a child and had lost hours to sweeping strokes across paving stones. He’d learned to differentiate between subtle shadows and muted tones, blending new greys between his fingertips to smudge over his clothing.

Black, white and the thousand shades between them were comfortable and sure. Colour was just, unnecessary. As he grew, he was gifted graphite and dark inks and a roll of rough parchment was always tucked against his hip. He could recreate everything his eye could see and his mind could form with the two fundamentals in his hands. All his most treasured early memories remain this way; his mother’s shining ebony hair, the smoky shade of her skin. The bright white of his father’s teeth as he spun her around in front of their home.

But there’s still no denying that colour changed everything. Colour that had come into his world with all the subtlety of the man at its source. Suddenly his life had burst into bold tints and fierce hues; endless possibilities for him to explore with paints and oils and pastels. Nine hundred years to experiment with the vibrancy of the world around him.

He and Nile reach for the blue together and smile.  
  


*

Nicky’s got his eye pressed tight to his scope when everything fades.

He’s dialling left, settling his weight into his hips and then a curtain of heavy grey drops across his view. He rears back rubbing at his eyes, trying to force the colours back.

“ _Shit_ … just- Book, hold up!” Andy’s voice crackles out of the earpiece Nicky’s placed on the rooftop beside him. He scrambles to jam it back in.

“Andy-”

“Take the shot Nicky.” There’s shouting coming from below and Andy is swearing vehemently. “I’ve got him, just take the shot!”

He lurches back into position trying to clear his mind. It’s all _wrong_ though, the shadows too dark and his depth perception is ruined -he’ll have to start all over. The dilution of his vision is making his heart thump erratically, and he has to count breaths in his head to keep himself still enough to reline up the shot.

Seconds later, the target steps out of the blackness and Nicky fires. The bullet cracks off the window frame, striking home at a cruel angle. He swears under his breath; it wasn’t clean, but he doesn’t care – the job’s done. He just needs to find Joe.

He takes the stairs at a speed that leaves his knees numb. At the extraction point, the van is already moving away as the door slides open. Nicky hurls his gear in and leaps after it. He gets the briefest glimpse of eyes too dark, and thick pewter stains across a torso before the door is slammed shut and he’s hauling Joe into his arms. They collide with a thump and Nicky quickly tucks his face against the grey skin of Joe’s neck with his eyes clenched shut. A hand burrows under the edge of his tactical gear until he feels the warmth at the small of his back.

Nicky pulls back to open his eyes and relief has him sagging further into the arms around him. Warm tawny skin shines against the dark khaki of Joe’s vest. He drags his mouth up the rich line of his throat, reluctant to break contact.

“Sorry.” Joe’s expression is chagrined when he lifts his head. “Got pinned down.”

There’s a smear of blood at the corner of Joe’s mouth, the newly crimson stain brash and mocking. Nicky rubs at it with a gloved thumb until the skin is clean and then presses his mouth gratefully to his favourite colour.

*

“A lilac ribbon in her hair. First colour I ever saw.”

The slight waver in his voice makes Nile wonder if she’s over-stepped again, if she’s put her foot in some unknown no-go zone and she opens her mouth to apologise. But Booker’s smiling, and that in itself is rare enough that Nile waits.

“It happened in a crowd. Must have been a hundred people in the square, easily…” his smile is widening. “God, it would have been so easy to have missed her. Soldiers were separating people, everyone was running and pushing and we just… brushed hands.”

Booker lifts his hand from his lap and turns it over slowly. “The back of her hand touched mine as she ran past. That was all.” He touches that spot, a glance of his finger. “I looked back, and her ribbon was lilac. But it was so busy, I lost sight of her in the rush.”

“But you found her again?” Nile has her head propped on her hands, trying not to sound too eager. Booker laughs gruffly.

“She found me. Came back for me.” He’s gripping his own hand tightly now, nails biting at the skin. “Lilac ribbon, hair like honey. Everything else came after that.”

“She sounds lovely.”

Booker looks up at her properly, and Nile’s acutely aware that whilst now they see the world in the same shades, it wasn’t always that way.

His voice is soft. “She was.”

*

Joe barely has time to shout before his world is plunged back into negatives, colour leaching from his vision. He’s scrambling, sliding in the pool of viscous grey he knows is blood as it spreads around Nicky’s skull.

He moves to cup Nicky’s face and can’t bear it. The sharp edge of his cheekbone throws dark shadows over his too pale face. Flecks and streaks of black over his skin; blood or dust or ash, Joe can’t _tell_ anymore and the panic is rising in his throat. He can’t look at Nicky’s colourless eyes – _he can’t_ \- he’ll carry the sight with him too long.

He tears his head away, his own eyes clenched shut – but before he has time to pray, to _plead_ , Nicky is gasping beneath him. The breath Joe releases is sticky and harsh, and he’s curling forward in his relief. Their hands collide quickly against each other’s forearms in an instinctive, accustomed clasp, and colours start seeping back immediately. The first to return are the shades of blue; bright aegean tones bursting in Nicky’s wide eyes, chased into existence by familiar notes of green. The weight lifts off Joe’s chest and for a moment he just breathes, air that tastes sweet and smooth as his other senses adjust to the disruption.

Then Nicky’s rolling. “Let’s go, Andy.”

*

They’re stood close enough to see the tremble in Andy’s arm as she reaches for Quynh’s face for the first time in over four hundred years.

Joe is frozen at his side, and Nicky’s breath is jammed somewhere in the base of his throat. He can’t believe this is actually happening.

Andy’s hand falters just shy of Quynh’s cheek with a ragged sound, fingers hovering. She opens her mouth to speak but Quynh reaches up and clamps the hand desperately to her face with her own. They shudder so violently Nicky wonders for a moment if the ground has physically quaked.

He knows the sensation well; that fierce swoop in the stomach. Like he’s stepped into free fall as the world saturates around him at Joe’s first touch. When they can reach each other quickly after a death, colour comes back in slow, precious increments; the shining browns of Joe’s eyes, or the dusky pink that rises in the shell of his ear. The longest they’ve gone after a death was four days. Four days in an east Indian jungle trapped in wet, translucent tones of black and white, the frustration building until he’d screamed at the sky. When he’d finally gotten his hands on Joe, grasping desperately at his bared shoulders, colour returning was an immediate detonation that had left his whole body throbbing for hours.

He can’t even begin to imagine what Andy and Quynh feel in this moment.

They go down as one, limbs folding together as they collapse into the dirt. Clutching at each other as their worlds transform. Quynh has Andy’s face trapped between her own palms now and is sobbing, laughing, trying to pull her closer. Andy’s tears are silent, but steady. Her eyes flitting over Quynh’s face in awe while she runs trembling fingertips over rosy cheeks she can _see._

Joe is squeezing his hand so tightly his fingers have gone numb, but the rush of joy in Nicky’s chest is golden and fierce. To stop himself moving forwards to pull Quynh into his own arms, he steps behind Joe and tugs him back, arms looping firmly around his middle.

“See? We are meant to find each other,” he whispers. Joe chuckles wetly against him.

On the ground, Quynh is smiling through her tears. “You’re beautiful Andromache,”

Andy hums hoarsely and runs her hands over Quynh’s arms, coming up to cradle her collar through the thick fabric of her coat. Her fingers rub at the material and Nicky knows the scarlet shade must be iridescent to her eyes. She lifts a thumb to Quynh’s lower lip.

“Red always was your colour.”

**Author's Note:**

> a tumblr prompt that got a little bit out of control
> 
> come scream with me at [the old kenzari](https://theoldkenzari.tumblr.com/)


End file.
